If Hollywood keeps to the script, there will be so many terrible
rip-offs of The Hangover the studios will eventually drop
the idea and then go to work cannibalising the next trend.

A couple of years ago the Hollywood craze was ultra-violent
horror movies.

The world can thank the sick minds of Australian filmmaking duo
James Wan and Leigh Whannell for bringing Saw to the big
screen in 2004, a movie with a tiny $US1.2 million ($A1.32 million)
budget that earned $US103 million ($A113.67 million) globally and a
highly-profitable sequel every year since.

Hostel, about backpackers being lured to Slovakia where
they were imprisoned and tortured by sickos willing to pay big
money for the pleasure, took the Saw violence to a new
level.

It spawned the forgettable Hostel: Part 2 and other
torture-horror films including possibly the worst film ever made,
Captivity, starring Canadian actress Elisha Cuthbert.

The ultra-violent films eventually killed themselves.

Hollywood's hot new trend is vampires.

By this time next year, the world will likely be tired of
fangs.

We can blame every teenage girl's favourite film, last year's
Twilight, for the mass-shipment of pasty, blood-thirsty
vampires to cinemas and TV.

Twilight cost just $US37 million ($A40.83 million) to
make, but earned almost $US400 million ($A441.45 million).

In November the sequel, The Twilight Saga: New Moon,
hits multiplexes and 12 months later the third edition, The
Twilight Saga: Eclipse, is set for release.

On TV, we have vampires in the series True Blood.
The Vampire Diaries also just launched on US TV.

On the big screen later this year, Salma Hayek stars in
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant.

Probably the best person to quiz about Hollywood's love of
flogging a successful idea to death is director-writer-producer JJ
Abrams.

He has one of Hollywood's freshest minds, creating the TV series
Lost, Alias and Fringe, and the feature
film Cloverfield.

Ironically, the 43-year-old New Yorker's two grandest projects
were re-makes of former successful, but flogged to death
franchises, Star Trek and Mission:
Impossible.

Abrams this year revitalised Star Trek with a film
starring Eric Bana. His master-plan was to focus on entertaining
non-Trekkies, rather than hardcore fans of Klingons and the USS
Enterprise - and he hit the jackpot.

In 2006, he directed Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible
III, which made almost $US400 million ($A441.45 million).

Abrams is preparing to make sequels to both.

"You see this all the time," Abrams, in Santa Monica last week
promoting the DVD release of Star Trek, said about
Hollywood's love of jumping on the bandwagon.

"When there is something that is successful, invariably there is
something ripping it off right on its heels.

"Typically, I feel those rip-offs are usually unsuccessful
partly because the thunder was already stolen from the first
thing.

"The thing what really clicked wasn't the thing they thought
clicked.

"(With Twilight) it's not the vampires, though there's
nothing wrong with a good vampire movie."

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<i>The Hangover</i> became the most profitable R-Rated feature in Hollywood history.